Archive for May, 2006

In a keynote at Symantec’s annual user conference, Ajei Gopal presented some key data points to validate the impending surge in tech spending. According to him, the IT sector as a whole is on the brink of a major innovation and spending cycle. He also presented a chart showing the IT-investments-to-GDP ratio growth overlaid with the advancements in computing and echoed the unabated progress in hardware; commoditization of memory, disk, CPU devices have reduced the prices by factor of thousands with net increase in ROI.
If this is an indicator of change, we are also seeing spurt in funding activity which is a strong supplementing signal.
This is also changing the rules of entrepreneurship and the startup culture, with incubators like “Y Combinator” seeding companies for as little as $6,000 while trying to replicate the success of Flickr and del.icio.us (both got acquired by Yahoo); wherein Google is saying that the whole valley is the research lab and then acquiring companies for a little change.Tags: Web 2.0, Symantec

Joined the Second Life crowd over the weekend as “TuFan Till”. Thinking of something unique to do there — I thought it would be a good idea to teach Hindi to the Second Life community. I already have a request :D) from a citizen! Let’s see if I could spend 30 minutes over the weekend teaching the “pleasantries” atleast; between tonnes of other stuff I have going on.
Second Life has a great potential as a platform or an OS (as Scobel calls it). Overall, I see lot of innovative stuff which could be done there (Lot of light bulbs glowing in my head, right now!).Tags: Second life, Hindi

Fred Wilson is reporting about the growing market share of FireFox.
Good to know that best of the breed browsers are controlling around 95% of the market. These are the browsers which support XMLHttpRequest, L1 DOM, CSS2 (in parts) and XHTML. The developer community should blindly remove any code which shows courtesy to the remaining 5% browsers and let the nasty javascript errors be visible so that the users actually upgrade.
Sigh of relief! Come IE 7, it wil probably take away the remaining 1.7% marketshare which Netscape still commands.